


bruised with purple grief

by Snickfic



Category: Zone Blanche | Black Spot
Genre: Comfort Sex, F/F, Friends With Benefits, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-04
Updated: 2019-09-04
Packaged: 2020-10-06 18:33:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20511575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/pseuds/Snickfic
Summary: Sometimes, when things are fucked, they fuck.





	bruised with purple grief

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rivine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rivine/gifts).

> I was so pleased to get to write a fic for this show that I've just fallen in love with. <3 There isn't enough forest in it, but maybe next time!

The bottle of wine is empty. Laurène’s monologue of woe—recalcitrant cars, incompetent doctors—has run dry. She’s said nothing about her mother, fading slowly in a hospital bed, or about Bertrand, who’s taken to warming Léa’s, but Leila knows anyway. The Villefranche rumor mill is ever-efficient.

“You haven’t said anything,” Laurène says, flushed, eyes huge with the sadness old and new. “Tell me about university. Are you operating on bodies yet?” She makes a face of adorable disgust.

Leila draws Laurène into her arms, ratty old sweater and all. “If you’re going to be police, you have to deal with bodies.”

“No,” Laurène says firmly. “Not yet.”

She’s warm against Leila’s side. She smells of wine and shampoo and the smoke of yesterday’s campfire, still not quite washed out of her hair. It feels a natural thing, an easy thing, to turn and kiss her ear. Afterward, Leila stays there, breathing on Laurène’s hair. Waiting.

Laurène tugs away; she looks Leila in the eye with tipsy deliberation. “Is that what you’re learning in the big city?” she asks.

“One of the things.” Leila tips her chin up. “Could be fun. You need a distraction.”

Laurène’s suspicion is not appeased. “Usually you try to distract me with a boy.”

“Do you see any boys here?” Leila asks, sweeping the living room with a gesture. They’re all alone; Pascal Weiss is at the hospital with his dying wife. “I’m too lazy to go out and find you one. It’s me or nothing, tonight.” It surprise her, how much she hopes it’s not nothing. She doesn’t think it’s just the wine.

Even so, she doesn’t expect Laurène’s lips on hers, or how they’ll feel. She doesn’t expect the kick in her chest when Laurène hovers over her, hair hanging in her face and eyes dark, for once, with something other than sadness.

\--

Probably crying over your ex isn’t considered good bedside manner. Leila doesn’t give a shit. “He just left his stuff at my place. He just left it!” She swabs Laurène’s arm with disinfectant. “He goes off to Rennes and I still have his fucking CDs. And his toolbox! What the hell kind of man is that?”

“A weird one,” Laurène says. She’s mostly stopped bleeding; none of the wounds are very deep. They’re just scrapes, mostly. “So am I going to live?”

“Somehow.” Leila lays out her gauze and tape. It’s quiet work, bandaging each wound in turn. Laurène is silent through it, and uncharacteristically still; for once she cannot simply stride off to do the next thing. Her breath calm and even, and her attention is fixed on Leila’s hands. Leila tears off the last piece of tape, presses it in place, and says, “You’re lucky, you know. It could have been bad.”

Laurène ignores this, of course, and shoves to her feet. “Thanks for letting me stop by.” 

“Are you staying for dinner?” Leila asks. She finds herself unwilling to let Laurène go so soon. “I think I have leftovers.”

Laurène rolls her sleeve down over the bandages. “And beer?”

“Of course beer,” Leila says.

Leila warms the remains of last night’s roast beef and vegetables, and Laurène emerges from the fridge with a beer for each of them. “You’ll find someone,” Laurène says.

Leila closes the microwave door with unnecessary force. “I’m an idiot. I knew—but I wished, you know? I thought—” She stops, irritated with André and the world and herself most of all. 

“You thought he was your soulmate,” Laurène says.

“Fuck,” Leila says, with a viciousness that surprises her. “You’re never going to stop reminding me of that.” An old memory, a teenaged confession. Usually it embarrasses her only insofar as it’s still true. “I didn’t even like him that much.”

Laurène rounds Leila’s kitchen island and curls an arm around Leila’s waist, so that Leila has no choice but to awkwardly drape her arm over Laurène’s shoulders. “Cora’s over at Marion’s tonight,” Laurène says, apropos of nothing. 

It takes Leila a moment to notice the way Laurène is staring so fixedly at the ceiling; another moment to feel Laurène’s thumb brushing ever so cautiously along Leila’s ribs. Laurène catches her looking. She looks back, her face open and uncertain.

She tastes of beer and smells of disinfectant. For a while, Leila forgets all about André.

\--

Leila finds Laurène in her office, staring into space. The office is dim, the desk lamp unlit. The evening’s last light is fading fast in the window. “All well?” Leila asks.

Laurène’s eyes are shadowed by more than poor lighting. “Any change?”

Martial was Leila’s last stop on the way out of the building. She’d checked all his vitals an hour before, but she checked them again while he lay quiet and uncomplaining and still. Then she came here to say, now, uselessly, “No change. I’m sorry.”

Laurène nods. She looks so tired. A silence stretches out, and Leila is about to excuse herself when Laurène says, “Can I come home with you?”

“With me?” Leila repeats, startled.

“You probably have plans,” Laurène says. Already she is retreating again, receding, as far as the horizon—barely visible. “Never mind.”

“No plans,” Leila says.

Laurène sits quietly at Leila’s kitchen table while Leila throws pasta together with sauce. When Laurène has something to say—when she found out she was pregnant with Cora, when Hermann said he was stepping down as sheriff—she fidgets. Tonight she is still and blank, like Martial in his bed. 

Leila tells stories over dinner about her last round of house calls. Laurène listens, her mouth twisting sometimes in a polite attempt a smile. When Leila puts their dirty plates in the sink, she is unsurprised to turn and find Laurène standing behind her, unsurprised when Laurène leans against her and puts her mouth to Leila’s neck. “Will you take me to bed?” Laurène says.

“All right,” Leila says.

They are awkward at first, standing in Leila’s bedroom. It’s been years since they did this last. But they always began with kisses, and so Leila takes Laurène’s hand and draws her in. She has always liked kissing Laurène; she likes how wide her mouth is, how Laurène’s kisses always turn hungry so quickly.

She likes Laurène’s breasts in her hands. “I never get to touch breasts anymore. Everyone in this town is so damn straight.”

Laurène laughs. She laughs, and Leila would never have guessed she could get Laurène to do that tonight. She’s smiling against Leila’s mouth as her fingers slip into Leila’s underwear.

It’s good, getting Laurène’s hands on her—in her. She’s got two of Laurène’s fingers buried in her up to the knuckle, working at just the right angle. “God, why do we only do this when things are fucked?” Leila wonders. “It’s fucking depressing. Fuck, no, don’t stop.” 

Laurène doesn’t.

They doze a while, after. When Leila comes to, she finds Laurène already pulling on her jeans. “I have to go back to the office,” Laurène says, as Leila expected. The furrow between her eyebrows has smoothed out, though: a job well done. Then she does something Leila doesn’t expect at all. She says, “We could.”

“Could what,” Leila says. Her thoughts are still a little hazy.

“Try it when things aren’t fucked. If that ever happens.” She shrugs against Leila’s surprise; she ducks away from it, pulling on her sweater. “You can think about it,” she says. Then she walks out, leaving Leila to think about it.

\--

“There is no one here I want,” Leila tells Laurène. Sabine’s holding court at the bar with a handful of her forest-rights friends, all with beards the length of Leila’s forearm. Paul and Martial huddle at a table in the corner. Paul’s hand is resting on Martial’s knee; it’s unbearably sweet.

“Too cold for tourists,” Laurène says serenely. 

It’s true. A few off-duty nurses from the hospital, a cluster of Steiner minions, the elderly Boitard couple who own Leila’s grocery: on an evening well below freezing, these are the rest of Leila’s choices. “I thought we were supposed to get some winter tourism here. Don’t people ski anymore?”

Laurène’s lips twitch. She’s laughing at Leila, and that’s not nothing. Leila scowls for effect just to see that light in Laurène’s eyes again. “Guess you’ll have to come home with me,” Laurène says. “I think I have a spare toothbrush.”

Leila has her own on Laurène’s bathroom counter, sitting in its own toothbrush-holder. “Just until I find my soulmate,” Leila warns.

“Of course,” Laurène says, and takes another sip of her beer.


End file.
